Pop Spotlight

There is a listener who has been pulled into the world of Måneskin. I can sense their excitement, their carefree spirit, their urge to bite their bottom lip and pantomime bending a guitar string as […]

For the past 10 months, the cavernous Duveen Galleries of London’s Tate Britain—the art gallery named for the sugar magnate who funded it—have featured a Technicolor parade of figures of all shapes and sizes, draped […]

Popstar Benny once said his music is “the soundtrack to a video game that doesn’t exist.” On the surface, that description only applies to the chirpy plugg beats and sound effects the Atlanta-based producer is […]

Smalltown Stardust reveals the sensitive side to King Tuff, the garage-rock persona Vermont eccentric Kyle Thomas adopted in the late 2000s. Those early King Tuff records—delivered just after Thomas spent some time playing in Witch, the stoner […]

The Men: Now there’s a band that knows how to self-mythologize. You might associate the punk four-piece with the Brooklyn music scene of the early 2010s, a world of 285 Kent gigs, Northside showcases, and the BrooklynVegan […]

Centuries of obscure folk tradition and a mistrust of isolated rural communities have helped birth a rich vein of pastoral horror in British music and film, from Incredible String Band and The Wicker Man in the late ’60s […]

The opening guitar riffs of “Counterillumination” slither like a predator stalking prey. Named after the camouflaging ability of animals in the mesopelagic zone—the ocean layer where light becomes increasingly scarce—the track sets a foreboding tone […]

Long before “lo-fi house” was blowing up play counts on YouTube, Kassem Mosse, aka Gunnar Wendel, was making hazy, low-visibility house jams that seemed to creep through a sooty midnight fog. Tarnished and corroded, betraying hints […]

But the money—as always with Smith—wasn’t enough, whether for the drugs he loved or the films he loved to make with them. So Smith sought out a record label head by the name of Moses […]

Popcaan’s music is slathered in sweetness. Andrae Sutherland has a gift for shiny, elastic flows, making him a singjay—a reggae or dancehall artist with an ultra-melodic style—in the purest form. His indelible 2014 anthem “Everything […]

By the time the new millennium rolled over, Shania Twain’s legacy was secure. With her 1997 blockbuster Come On Over, the Canadian singer established a fresh mold for modern women in country and pop music, […]